Awards

Alongside celebrating the student graduates of 2025, the 193rd Commencement Ceremony also honors the esteemed individuals, alumni, and faculty whose work and service has educated and inspired so many to action and toward creating a better world.

Binswanger Prizes for Excellence in Teaching

Each year at Commencement, Wesleyan University recognizes three outstanding faculty members with the awarding of the Binswanger Prizes for Excellence in Teaching. Underscoring Wesleyan’s commitment to its scholar-teachers, these annual prizes are made possible by gifts from the family of the late Frank G. Binswanger Sr., Hon’85. Recipients are chosen each spring by a committee composed of faculty and members of the Alumni Association Executive Committee based upon strong recommendations from alumni of the last 10 graduating classes, as well as current juniors, seniors, and graduate students.

David Constantine

Dave Constantine is an associate professor of mathematics. A versatile educator, he has taught a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses since joining Wesleyan in 2012. Particular teaching interests include courses in geometry, analysis, and probability, all of which have strong connections to his research. While at Wesleyan he developed an interest in teaching statistics, and he has worked to broaden and strengthen the department’s offerings, from the introductory-level Elementary Statistics through advanced major-level courses like Mathematical Statistics. He has served as a research mentor for a number of undergraduates and considers teaching and mentoring graduate students to be one of his favorite parts of working at Wesleyan.

Constantine received his PhD from the University of Michigan and was a postdoc at the University of Chicago before coming to Wesleyan. He researches problems at the boundary of geometry and dynamics, often focusing on geodesic flows and rigidity phenomena, and he collaborates with a number of other mathematicians. A recent project, funded by an American Institute of Mathematics grant, developed aspects of thermodynamic formalism for geodesic flows on CAT(0) spaces. This work allowed Constantine to collaborate with four other mathematicians, including a former Wesleyan PhD student. His work has been published in various mathematics journals.

Logan Dancey

Logan Dancey is an associate professor of government with research and teaching interests in the US Congress, campaigns and elections, and public opinion. His work has appeared in such journals as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, and Political Behavior. He is also a co-author (with Kjersten Nelson and Eve Ringsmuth) of the book It’s Not Personal: Politics and Policy in Lower Court Confirmation Hearings. In his teaching at Wesleyan, especially in his Campaigns and Elections and Public Opinion and Polling Lab courses, he has engaged students in conducting and analyzing surveys of local voters and Wesleyan students. He has co-authored two peer-reviewed publications with former students and had students present their research at the Midwest, Southern, and New England Political Science Association Conferences.

Dancey holds a BA from the University of Puget Sound and a PhD from the University of Minnesota. He was a postdoctoral associate at the University of Pittsburgh prior to joining the Wesleyan faculty in 2012. He was awarded the University’s 2014–15 Carol A. Baker ’81 Memorial Prize recognizing accomplishments of junior faculty. His current research focuses on the federal judicial confirmation process, political polarization in the public and in Congress, and Americans’ perceptions of the state of US democracy.

Camilla Zamboni

Camilla Zamboni is an associate professor of the practice in Italian. Since 2014, she has coordinated the Italian language program in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Her expertise in language acquisition, pedagogy, and open educational resources (OER) led to the creation of Assaggi, an OER curriculum used at Wesleyan in intermediate Italian courses. In the College of Education Studies, Zamboni is part of the core faculty and teaches the Educational Gaming Lab, a course where students discuss and create educational games.

Known for her innovative work in analog game-based learning and tabletop game design, Zamboni is often an invited speaker on these topics. Her recent scholarship includes the co-edited volume Roll for Learning (2024), a curated collection of educational micro tabletop role-playing games, and articles on the interplay of pedagogy and game design such as “Language, Play, Storytelling: Tabletop Role-Playing Games in the Italian L2 Classroom” (2025). Affiliated with the College of Design and Engineering Studies, Zamboni oversees the IDEAS interactive media and game design minor concentration. Also affiliated with the Fries Center for Global Studies, she developed the Italian Gaming Lab, a Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum course that focuses on using and designing games for language learning, and has served on the advising board for the global engagement minor and the Language Collective.

Honorary Doctoral Degrees

The honorary degree recipients will be Ian Bassin ’98, Executive Director of Protect Democracy, who will also deliver the commencement address; Lael Brainard ’83, P’22, who served as director of the National Economic Council under President Joe Biden; and Percival Everett, celebrated author and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Ian Bassin ’98

Ian Bassin is co-founder and Executive Director of Protect Democracy. He previously served as Associate White House Counsel under President Obama, where in addition to counseling the President and senior White House staff on administrative and constitutional law, he worked to ensure that executive branch officials complied with the laws, rules and norms that protect the fundamentally democratic nature of our government. His writing on democracy, authoritarianism, and American law and politics has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Salon, The New York Review of Books and other publications. A recipient of a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship and the Skoll Award for Social Innovation, he has repeatedly been named among the 500 most influential people in Washington by Washingtonian Magazine. He received his JD from Yale Law School and a BA from Wesleyan University.

Lael Brainard ’83, P’22

Lael Brainard has served as the 14th Director of the National Economic Council, Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve, and Undersecretary of the Treasury. With extensive senior leadership experience in macro, fiscal, and monetary policymaking, Brainard has contributed to the successful resolution of several financial crises, including the Asian financial crisis, Euro Area Crisis, COVID-19 crisis, 2023 debt limit impasse, and U.S. regional banking crisis. The New York Times has described Brainard as “America’s top financial diplomat” for her high-level negotiations with China and Europe. Brainard was an assistant and associate professor of applied economics at MIT Sloan School of Management. She founded the Brookings Global Economy and Development program. Brainard received a BA with university honors from Wesleyan University and a PhD in economics from Harvard University, where she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship. She is also the recipient of a White House Fellowship, the Alexander Hamilton Award, and the Harvard Centennial Medal.

Percival Everett

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including The Trees (shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and winner of the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Erasure (adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction), and most recently the bestseller James (shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, won the 2024 National Book Award, and was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Fiction). The New Yorker praised Everett for having “regularly exploded our models of genre and identity,” while The New York Times described James as “majestic,” adding that “Everett, like [Mark] Twain, is a master of American argot; he is the code switcher’s code switcher.” Everett has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction and has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Everett received a BA from the University of Miami and an MA in fiction writing from Brown University. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.